Abstract
“FROM this time forth space and time apart from each other are become mere shadows, and only a kind of compound of the two can have any reality.” So spoke Herrmann Minkowski in 1908. But his statement has not yet been realised. It is still the elect to whom it is given to escape from the bondage of their own consciousness so completely that they can think of time as nothing more than the most convenient means of ordering events. Sir Oliver Lodge was voicing the feeling of the man in the street when, at Birmingham, he said: “Surely, we must admit that space and time are unchangeable: they are not at the disposal even of mathematicians.”
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References
H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein . H. Minkowski : Das Relativittsprinzip. A Collection of the Classical Papers in the Development of the Theory of Relativity, from 1895 to 1910. Pp. 89, with portrait of Minkowski. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1913.) Price 3 marks.
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Space and Time 1 . Nature 93, 532–533 (1914). https://doi.org/10.1038/093532c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/093532c0